Americans in Paris

“Inglourious Basterds” and “Julie & Julia.”

Brad Pitt as an officer and Diane Kruger as a spy in Quentin Tarantino’s movie.Credit JOHN RITTER

In Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds”—an extravagant jest about the Second World War—Joseph Goebbels commissions a propaganda combat film and assembles the Nazi leaders in occupied Paris, in 1944, for its première at a lovely Art Deco theatre. As the big night approaches, groups of European movie people and Jewish American soldiers plot to use the occasion to eliminate the Nazi command and bring an end to the Third Reich. (Some plan to set fire to the theatre, others to blow it up.) The anti-Nazi cinemaphiles include the female theatre owner; her black lover and projectionist; a leading German actress who spies for the British; and, of all people, a critic—an English expert on German cinema who attempts to pass himself off as an S.S. officer. The Americans are themselves right out of the movies: the Inglourious Basterds, as they are known, are a kind of Jewish Dirty Dozen, led by a Gentile, Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a blunt, jawjutting tough guy from Tennessee (which is where Tarantino is from). In brief, Tarantino has gone past his usual practice of decorating his movies with homages to others. This time, he has pulled the film-archive door shut behind him—there’s hardly a flash of light indicating that the world exists outside the cinema except as the basis of a nutbrain fable.

Since 1941, the Basterds have been killing German soldiers in occupied France, sometimes by beating them with a baseball bat. Then they scalp them (the explanation: Raine has Native American blood). The lieutenant also carves swastikas into Nazi foreheads. Whether the Basterds are Tarantino’s ideal of an all-American killing team or his parody of one is hard to know. Very little in “Basterds” is meant to be taken straight, but the movie isn’t quite farce, either. It’s lodged in an uneasy nowheresville between counterfactual pop wish fulfillment and trashy exploitation, between exuberant nonsense and cinema scholasticism. In the middle of this crazy narrative, Tarantino pauses to pay his respects, like an unctuous film professor, to the immortals of German cinema. The great G. W. Pabst! Emil Jannings! (They are brought to Paris for the première.) The cinema, it seems, is both innocent and heroic; it creates great art, and it will end the war. The fire is started by the burning of old nitrate-based movies behind the screen.

“Inglourious Basterds” is not boring, but it’s ridiculous and appallingly insensitive—a Louisville Slugger applied to the head of anyone who has ever taken the Nazis, the war, or the Resistance seriously. Not that Tarantino intends any malice toward such earnest people. The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes—articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director’s work after “Jackie Brown,” the movie is pure sensation. It’s disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness—it’s too shallow to be called nihilism—undermines even the best scenes. At the beginning, for example, in 1941, an S.S. patrol, led by Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), questions a French farmer about a family of Jews who may be hiding on his property. The scene is methodically staged. Colonel Landa is polite, even flirtatious, and Tarantino increases the tension gradually, shooting and editing the confrontation with classical rigor. Landa promises the farmer—a man of great dignity—that he will protect his family if he turns over the Jews, which he finally does, though unwillingly. They are hiding under the floorboards, and Landa’s men shoot all of them, except for a young woman, Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who disappears into the countryside. (We meet her again later, as the owner of the Paris theatre.) Does Landa keep his promise and allow the farmer’s family to survive? The scene ends, and Tarantino doesn’t say. His refusal to show us how events play out comes across as sheer negligence, or indifference.

Moral callousness has been part of Tarantino’s style in the past. In “Pulp Fiction,” his merry roundelay set among Los Angeles lowlifes, the aggressive acts that the characters commit against one another are so abrupt and extreme that they become funny. The movie’s outrageous panache gave the audience license to enjoy the violence as lawless entertainment. But, in “Basterds,” Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn’t carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes. Tarantino’s hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager. It should be said, however, that the scenes set in Paris, in which Tarantino imagines the formal but abrasive nature of social life among the Nazi élite, are all beautifully designed (by David and Sandy Wasco) and photographed (by Robert Richardson). The director has also given prominence to a good actor new to American audiences: the Austrian-born Christoph Waltz, who, as Landa, exudes the kind of insinuating menace characteristic of Nazis in old Warner Bros. movies. The role may be a cliché, but Waltz is brilliant in it; he takes an intellectual pleasure in devilry.

The film is skillfully made, but it’s too silly to be enjoyed, even as a joke. Tarantino may think that he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy (in the burning theatre, working-class Jewish boys get to pump Hitler and Göring full of lead), but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated. Tarantino has become an embarrassment: his virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque. “Inglourious Basterds” is a hundred and fifty-two minutes long, but Tarantino’s fans will wait for the director’s cut, which no doubt shows Shirley Temple arriving at Treblinka with the Glenn Miller band and performing a special rendition of “Baby Take a Bow,” from the immortal 1934 movie of the same name, before she fetchingly leads the S.S. guards to the gas chamber.

Julia Child, in “The French Chef”—her first TV series, which began in 1963—was amazingly quick. Moving her pots and pans and little bowls of chopped onions and clarified butter around the counter, she might have been a three-card-monte player in Times Square. American home cooks may have mastered Child’s recipes, but her hands, in their sureness and speed, were unmatchable by anyone but a pro. Child was strong in so many ways, and her absence of fear and self-consciousness allowed her to express a good cheer and a satisfaction in life that even a five-year-old could feel. Her verbal style, in its high-pitched insistence, may have resembled that of a Boston dowager, but she was a Californian, from Pasadena, and probably spoke that way naturally, not as a cultural inheritance but as an irreducible expression of self. She was incapable of modern irony. In “Julie & Julia,” Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed, and her star, Meryl Streep, push the mannerisms a bit. They have to—the comic possibilities are irresistible. The filmmakers mounted Streep on platform heels, stretched her out, and put her together with the compact Stanley Tucci (as Child’s loving husband, Paul). Like a tall ship in full sail, Streep leans, tilts, and billows. Odd explosions of air—whoops, exclamations—come hurtling through the passageways. She runs out of breath, and then settles, mysteriously, like an old Bible that italicizes ordinary words, on a single syllable. It’s all extremely funny, but Ephron and Streep stop short of camp. They know that there’s no way anyone can make, or would want to make, Julia Child look second-rate.

The movie alternates between Child’s story as a restless American in Paris in the nineteen-fifties, longing to write a cookbook, and the adventures in Queens, in 2002, of a lost young American wife (Amy Adams), who sets out to replicate Child’s recipes—a structure that is more a rhyming device than a dramatic idea. Yet it works well enough to hold together a dual fable of driving ambition and anxious discipleship. “Julie & Julia” is one of the gentlest, most charming American movies of the past decade. Its subject is less food as something to cook than food as the binding and unifying element of dinner parties, friendship, and marriage. Manners and sociability obsess Nora Ephron: How did a happy middle-aged couple like the Childs speak to each other sixty years ago? How does that compare with the way a young couple speak now? And the director exploits a neat little joke—the formal and serene Childs have a hot sex life, while the hip young couple hardly make love at all. The miracle of the Childs’ marriage was that food was never the main course. It was more like a perpetual appetizer. ♦

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